And So Begins the Great Paul Ryan Comeback

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In 1984, Gary Hart ran for president. He talked about the need for a leaner, tougher military to defend against asymmetric threats to the United States itself. He talked about the nation's crumbling infrastructure and its inevitable effect on public safety and the economy, and did I remember to point out that this was 19-eighty-freaking-four? Then, of course, some Monkey Business happened, and Gary Hart, who was right about everything then and is still right about it now, pretty much disappeared from the national dialogue.

I mention this because a onetime figure of national revulsion is a'wandering back to center stage. Long ago, the Republicans developed a dark formula to energize their Undead. First, of course, was the 40-year experiment in the dark arts that was Richard Nixon. Now, it appears that Paul Ryan has spent some time in the lab and has now decided to re-emerge as the Man of Ideas — especially among young Republican congressmen who have few of their own.

He's learned his lessons well. There's the pious intellectual martyrdom, the lonely man thinking Big Thoughts who is beset by tactics that are there "to sort of isolate and demonize, to vilify...". But, luckily, "Ideas beat that." This guy is as good as Nixon ever was at driving the nails into his own palms. There is his mastery of the Sad Prophet Face, the tragedy of a man of Great Vision surrounded by lesser beings unable to follow him into the vast intellectual thickets of his own mind. He may have practiced the pose by studying himself in the funhouse mirror that Ayn Rand's fiction provides to overstimulated teenagers of any age. But it was Newt Gingrich who truly perfected the role, using it to dazzle another group of Republican children in the House back in the days before everyone noticed that Newt was 100 pounds of fraud in a 50-pound bag.

So, once again, It Walks the Earth, although I'm a bit less impressed than Politico is that Ryan is willing to subject himself to ordeals like The Laura Ingraham Show and a Facebook Town Hall with "GOP Young Guns." (Ooh, was Senator Emilio Estevez there? Congressman Lou Diamond Phillips?) And how speaking at an Indiana Republican dinner with Governor Mitch Daniels, who isn't running, is "injecting himself into the politics of 2012" eludes me. However, Ryan did go out and give a speech at The Hoover Institute outlining "alternatives" to the Affordable Care Act. There is political shrewdness to his remarks; Ryan makes a point of cherry-picking some quotes from the Obama Administration about Medicare to imply that "we're" all in the same boat. Of course, his ideas have as much to do with how actual people are living their lives in this country as the X-Men do with national defense.

At one point, Ryan proposes "replacing the inefficient tax treatment of employer-provided health care with a portable, refundable tax credit that you can take with you from job to job, allowing you to hang onto your insurance even during those tough times when a job might be hard to find."

In other words, if you have a job, we will tax the your health-care benefits that your employer keeps whittling back because we're all one day going to be working in Mississippi. Or, if you don't, we will offer you a "portable refundable tax credit" that doesn't have any chance at all of being able to keep up with the cost of decent insurance while you're unemployed. And what is this "moving from job to job" of which he speaks? There are some people — moochers all of them, no doubt — who believe that the basic problem with health care is that not enough people have it. This notion is elided entirely in favor of a speech about "consumers" and "choice" and a lot of other buzzwordy think-tank flummery with a number of Randian tells, including giving "patients the incentive to act on this information." Get out there and shop for insurance, Grandma. You're empowered now! And the country Paul Ryan envisions is still pretty goddamn bleak.